IAPO African Regional Meeting

The meeting which will take place in Uganda from 4thto 5th July, 2017 will bring together IAPO members, patient representatives and a range of stakeholders from over 10 different countries across Africa.

Harmonisation for Patient-centred Universal Health Coverage in Africa

Through interactive capacity building and knowledge-sharing sessions, IAPO members and stakeholders will develop tools to ensure that the patient movement across the region is made up of strong patient advocates. The goal will be to prepare patient advocates to take on the challenges and opportunities to arise from increasing regulatory harmonisation across Africa over the next few years.

Harmonisation will ensure the availability of safe, good quality and reasonably priced medicines that have been a challenge for many African countries, by establishing new and strong evidence based legal frameworks. As we know, many national medicines regulatory authorities (NMRAs) in Africa have limited capacity to approve medicines in a timely manner and to ensure acceptable quality, safety and efficacy standards which directly impacts on the care and medicines that patients in Africa can access.

Therefore, during the meeting, patients’ organisations across the region will be empowered to support the establishment and improvement of standards and requirements related to the regulation of and access to safe and high-quality medicines for ourselves.